America can’t confront slavery’s legacy without reckoning with its long and violent end

Time featured commentary wriiten by Carole Emberton, that explains how the Emancipation Proclamation was the beginning of a process, and not a single event, that ended slavery in United States. Emberton shares stories from interviews gathered by the Federal Writers Project, a Depression-era initiative that grew out of the Works Progress Administration. “The FWP interviews are filled with [many] emancipation stories, ones that run counter to the scenes of ‘Jubilee’ that we often associated with the Emancipation Proclamation,” she writes.